Timothy Kircher:
Humanist Conversations: The Creative Range of Renaissance Dialogue

On the backdrop of the 550th anniversary of Leon Battista Alberti's death and the publication of the first German edition and comment of his dialogue Della tranquillità dell'animo in April 2022 the lecture series Alberti Revisited will focus on the artistic, ethico-aesthetic, linguistic and socio-political implications of his oeuvre. Thus, the intertextual and interdisciplinary complexity of Alberti's thought as well as his relation with the cultural dynamics of his time will be examined from a variety of perspectives and, not least, Alberti's topicality will be critically analysed. The invited speakers come from the fields of art and architectural history, history, philology, and philosophy.

This talk investigates how humanist dialogue entertained a range of perspectives and meaning, both through the formal interplay of speakers and through the ambiguous use of language. We examine the De Familia and Theogenius of Leon Battista Alberti and the first letter-collection of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, also composed in the 1440s. The polyvalent character of these exchanges entailed an experiential, phenomenological understanding of language and learning attuned to the care and consolation of others, as a form of Renaissance narrative medicine.